Re: [RFC PATCH 07/11] tests/avocado: Add ppc boot tests for non-free AIX images

[Nicholas Piggin]

On Tue Oct 10, 2023 at 11:01 PM AEST, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 10, 2023 at 01:43:16PM +0100, Alex Bennée wrote:
> > 
> > Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com> writes:
> > 
> > > An AIX image can be provided by setting AIX_IMAGE environment
> > > variable when running avocado.
> > >
> > > It's questionable whether we should carry these in upstream QEMU.
> > > It's convenient to see how to run these things, but simple enough
> > > to maintain in out of tree branch. I just wanted to see opinions
> > > about it.
> > 
> > Yeah there is no point adding a test no one else can run. We already
> > have tests that utilise dead URLs that can only run if you happen to
> > have the image in the avocado cache which should arguably be removed.
>
> I can understand the appeal of wanting to sanity check QEMU
> with esentially arbitrary guest OS, whether modern, or obsolete,
> whether OSS or proprietary.
>
> The appeal of getting the test integrated into QEMU is you don't
> have to worry about rebasing / merging local git changes forever
> more.
>
> I feel like this tells us we should not require users to be writing
> new avocado python test code merely to get a boring old guest OS
> boot up smoke test integrated into avocado.

Interesting thought. It is easier to be able to specify images
location, qemu command line, and some expected output and input
than to write an avocado test entirely. OTOH if you copy an
existing one and don't need to do anything different then it is
not so hard.

>
> I think we ought to have a 'guest_smoke_test.py' avocado test, that
> pulls in guest OS scenarios from external YAML/JSON files. eg
>
>   $ cat ppc_aix.yaml
>   image:
>     url: https:////some/path
>     checksum: xxxxxx
>   console:
>     expect: ...some console message...
>   vm:
>     arch: ppc64
>     machine: pseries
>     ....something something extra cli args something something...
>
> Users could then set
>
>   export  
> QEMU_SMOKE_TEST_PATHS=$HOME/my-guestos-library:$HOME/shared-guestos-library
>   make check-avocado
>
> to load all the guest OS scenarios from these dirs, in addition to
> any scenarios that are shipped in qemu.git by default.

There would be a bunch of upstream avocado tests that could be
converted to such a format.

Thanks,
Nick